...a photoBook is an autonomous art form, comparable with a piece of sculpture, a play or a film. The photographs lose their own photographic character as things 'in themselves' and become parts, translated into printing ink, of a dramatic event called a book...
- Dutch photography critic Ralph Prins

Paul Schuitema, born in the Netherlands, was a graphic designer proficient in typography, furniture-making, architecture, photography, painting, lithography and film. Schuitema, started out as a painter, studying at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam. After the first World War, Schuitema left painting and embraced early modernism: his interest in mass production and technology lead him to apply the principals of de Stijl, Constructivism and Bauhaus to advertising and print media. He was a member of Kurt Schwitter's Ring neue Werbegestalter (Circle of New Advertising Designers), which included contemporaries Piet Zwart, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Jan Tschichold.

With his experimental use of photography, Schuitema made a significant contribution to the New Photography movement, later becoming one of the first teachers at the Academy of Visual Art in The Hague. It was there that he taught design and photography.

Complex and various, the Ars Libri collection includes advertising brochures and pamphlets for industry and government agencies, flyers, pamphlets, and announcement cards, cover designs for magazines and books, letterhead stationery, postage stamps, and other items, covering the whole of his his career. Schuitema’s commissions from the manufacturers Berkel(who's advertising work he is best know for), Gispen, Boele & van Eesteren, and de Vries Robbé & Co. are all represented in depth, including proofs and signed examples.

Also included is a rare early woodcut by the artist, a group of posters from his later career (some of them signed), and several large-format photographs. The collection is accompanied by a small group of reference books and exhibition catalogues on Schuitema and his work.

zondag 29 mei 2011

Menno Huizinga (1907 - 1947)

Menno Huizinga

Menno Huizinga was one of the more distinguished professional Dutch photographers in the 1930s, but is best known for the photographs he took during the German occupation.

In 1942 his house in The Hague was pulled down to make room for the German coastal fortifications, the Atlantic wall. He decided to take illegal pictures of the process with his Leica, often concealed in a cheese-box which he carried on his bicycle. During the occupation he changed from a trustworthy industrial photographer into a clandestine reporter who was always in the right place at the right time.

Up to and including the liberation, Huizinga took approxi mately 750 pictures of daily life in The Hague, usually on his own initiative. After the war he selected and arranged some 420 of them to form seventeen thematic series: the demolition of the city; the clearance of The Hague's wooded area called the Haagse Bos; the evacuation of Wassenaar and Marlot; buildings used by the Germans; means of transport; the events of Tuesday September 5 1944, when liberation seemed imminent but did not happen; fuel shortage; food; the woods at Scheveningen; V2 strikes; garbage disposal; reading in the street; the arrival of the Canadians and the Princess Irene Brigade; the departure of the Germans; after the liberation; the Queen's return; famine. Of these, famine was the only commissioned series, compiled for the Local Interdenominational Office for the City and District of The Hague. The reportage arrived in England before the liberation and part of it was published there in the London-based Vrij Nederland. As well as the photos of everyday life in The Hague which Huizinga took as in his professional capacity, he also made photographs on microfilm for a resistance group. Huizinga's wartime negatives passed to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation during his lifetime.

Menno Huizinga (1907 - 1947)

Menno Huizinga

Menno Huizinga was one of the more distinguished professional Dutch photographers in the 1930s, but is best known for the photographs he took during the German occupation.

In 1942 his house in The Hague was pulled down to make room for the German coastal fortifications, the Atlantic wall. He decided to take illegal pictures of the process with his Leica, often concealed in a cheese-box which he carried on his bicycle. During the occupation he changed from a trustworthy industrial photographer into a clandestine reporter who was always in the right place at the right time.

Up to and including the liberation, Huizinga took approxi mately 750 pictures of daily life in The Hague, usually on his own initiative. After the war he selected and arranged some 420 of them to form seventeen thematic series: the demolition of the city; the clearance of The Hague's wooded area called the Haagse Bos; the evacuation of Wassenaar and Marlot; buildings used by the Germans; means of transport; the events of Tuesday September 5 1944, when liberation seemed imminent but did not happen; fuel shortage; food; the woods at Scheveningen; V2 strikes; garbage disposal; reading in the street; the arrival of the Canadians and the Princess Irene Brigade; the departure of the Germans; after the liberation; the Queen's return; famine. Of these, famine was the only commissioned series, compiled for the Local Interdenominational Office for the City and District of The Hague. The reportage arrived in England before the liberation and part of it was published there in the London-based Vrij Nederland. As well as the photos of everyday life in The Hague which Huizinga took as in his professional capacity, he also made photographs on microfilm for a resistance group. Huizinga's wartime negatives passed to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation during his lifetime.

zaterdag 28 mei 2011

For the past year Pieter Hugo has been photo graphing the people and landscape of an expansive dump of obsolete techno logy in Ghana. The area, on the outskirts of a slum known as Agbogbloshie, is referred to by local inhabitants as Sodom and Gomorrah, a vivid acknowledgment of the profound inhumanity of the place. When Hugo asked the inhabitants what they called the pit where the burning takes place, they repeatedly responded: ‘For this place, we have no name’.

Their response is a reminder of the alien circumstances that are imposed on marginal communities of the world by the West’s obsession with consumption and obsolesce. This wasteland, where people and cattle live on mountains of motherboards, monitors and discarded hard drives, is far removed from the benefits accorded by the unrelenting advances of technology.

The UN Environment Program has stated that Western countries produce around 50 million tons of digital waste every year. In Europe, only 25 percent of this type of waste is collected and effectively recycled. Much of the rest is piled in containers and shipped to developing countries, supposedly to reduce the digital divide, to create jobs and help people. In reality, the inhabitants of dumps like Agbogbloshie survive largely by burning the electronic devices to extract copper and other metals out of the plastic used in their manufacture. The electronic waste contaminates rivers and lagoons with consequences that are easily imaginable. In 2008 Green Peace took samples of the burnt soil in Agbogbloshie and found high concentrations of lead, mercury, thallium, hydrogen cyanide and PVC.

Notions of time and progress are collapsed in these photographs. There are elements in the images that fast-forward us to an apocalyptic end of the world as we know it, yet the alchemy on this site and the strolling cows recall a pastoral existence that rewinds our minds to a medieval setting. The cycles of history and the lifespan of our technology are both clearly apparent in this cemetery of artifacts from the industrialised world. We are also reminded of the fragility of the information and stories that were stored in the computers which are now just black smoke and melted plastic.